Peace Corps service is an amazing and often precarious journey of personal growth. Mongolia is enduringly strange and wonderful, a perfect setting for two years of hardy living and a lifetime of reflection. An old Mongolian proverb suggests: “The best of horses is known by riding, the best of people is recognized by friendship.” In Mongolia, we have made good friends, we’ve made a good life and we have, in our mind’s eyes, great memories enough to outlast even ourselves. Though we’re eager to return to America next summer, there is nowhere else we would rather be right now.
Peter Gerlach and his wife, Cady Sinnwell, write: Peace Corps volunteers meet challenges in Mongolia
Column: Peace Corps volunteers meet challenges in Mongolia
By Peter Gerlach and Cady Sinnwell
For The Post-Crescent • March 4, 2009
Caption: Peter Gerlach offers a khadag, a blue silk scarf, to the Eej Mod, the Mother Tree, an important place of worship for Mongolians. Submitted photo.
Editor's note: Appleton native Peter Gerlach and his wife, Cady Sinnwell, have been serving in the Peace Corps in Mongolia since June 2007. Peter is a 1998 graduate of Appleton North High School, and both Peter and Cady are Ripon College graduates.
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We’re very proud to say that we’re Peace Corps volunteers serving in Mongolia. It’s a job that has been nothing like what we thought it would be.
A year and a half into our service, we can confidently say that the rewards have well outweighed the frustrations. We have been challenged intellectually, emotionally and spiritually.
The experience of living in Mongolia and with the people of Mongolia has strengthened us as individuals and as a married couple. At the end of each day, it is that challenge which makes this all worthwhile.
Being a Peace Corps volunteer isn’t easy. The days can be long and the frustrations great, but the education in life — the willingness to not only teach but be taught in and by a different culture — makes being Peace Corps volunteers one of the most rewarding opportunities of our lives.
Mongolia is an Asian country of just under three million people, land-locked between Russia and China. Eight hundred years ago, the Mongols, under the leadership of Chinggis Khaan (more commonly known as Genghis Khan), ruled the largest contiguous empire in world history.
Today, things are different. Chinggis’ image may be on everything from the national currency to vodka bottles to key chains, but Mongolia is again a developing nation, a country in search of a modern identity.
In these post-communist days, Mongolia is still known for its rustic and often romanticized nomadic culture — gers (round, white, felt tents) peppering the countryside and wild horses running free across the expansive plains. It is, some might say, the wild west of Asia, the last great, open steppe.
Mongolia is a place where the past mingles somewhat uncomfortably with the present, always wondering what the future will bring. This is a Peace Corps country in which American volunteers must be ever-mindful of the reservations many have about change.
The influences of Western culture we bring must be carefully balanced with an awareness that this is a nation yet uncertain of altering too far from its current pace and lifestyle.
In our own small corner of Mongolia, we live in Darkhan-Uul. Established in 1961, it’s now the second- or third-largest city in the country, depending on who you ask. With a population of around 75,000, it’s about the size of Appleton.
Darkhan is home to a largely younger crowd, most of whom live in old-style Russian apartments. The city is about 90 miles from the Russian border, only a small reminder of the heavy Russian influence so ingrained in Mongolian culture.
Darkhan is a kind of in-between place. It isn’t a bustling city like Ulaanbaatar, the capital, but it’s not quiet and slow like the countryside. It is, we think, a happy medium.
Surrounded by tall hills, especially beautiful on sunny days or under a blanket of snow, Darkhan is a welcomed site after long travel. On the other side of the world, this has become our home, in place and in our hearts.
In Darkhan, Cady works as a Community Economic Development volunteer, working at the GER (Growing Entrepreneurship Rapidly) Initiative project being implemented by the Mongolian NGO, Development Solutions. Her work, like Peter’s, focuses mostly on sustainability and the capacity building of her Mongolian counterparts. She and her colleagues work to improve area low-income residents' income through small business development.
Her work takes her in new directions every day, from spending time with local farmers on farming techniques for "uncommon vegetables” like broccoli and corn to creating and presenting training materials on leadership and motivation for local cooperatives and small companies.
Outside of her primary job, she spends time with her English Conversation Club, a weekly gathering of community students and residents. She also concentrates much of her efforts on human trafficking issues facing Mongolians.
In addition to working with local students and teachers, she has been collaborating with other Peace Corps volunteers to educate more than 2,000 Mongolians in the past year and a half on trafficking. Her responsibilities, affecting many facets of Mongolian life, have brought her to a better understanding of her country of service and into close relationships with the people in her ever-expanding community.
Peter is a university English teacher at the School of Technology in Darkhan, a branch of the Mongolian University of Science and Technology, the largest university chain in Mongolia. His work is sometimes difficult because he experiences firsthand the effects of post-communism on the Mongolian educational system.
Though English has been declared the country’s official second language, the methodologies and pedagogies of “traditional” teaching systems has made learning English challenging. His greatest efforts, then, like all Peace Corps volunteers, are capacity building and sustainability.
Each day, he attempts to find new and interesting ways to not only teach English, but to create an environment in which critical and imaginative thinking are central to learning and a tool for continued learning.
He has taught students and teachers alike how to use new methods and how to push for greater expectations. They, in turn, have taught him much about patience and compromise. As far as Peace Corps placements go, he considers himself lucky to have been put in a place so suited to his personality.
In the end, though, it isn’t all about work. he has made good friends and has been welcomed with open and accepting arms into a community of administrators, teachers and students who are, like him, always in search of knowledge and are interested in the shared experience of learning.
Peace Corps service is an amazing and often precarious journey of personal growth. Mongolia is enduringly strange and wonderful, a perfect setting for two years of hardy living and a lifetime of reflection.
An old Mongolian proverb suggests: “The best of horses is known by riding, the best of people is recognized by friendship.” In Mongolia, we have made good friends, we’ve made a good life and we have, in our mind’s eyes, great memories enough to outlast even ourselves.
Though we’re eager to return to America next summer, there is nowhere else we would rather be right now.
Peter Gerlach and Cady Sinnwell: pcletters@postcrescent.com
